Onticology– A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology Part 2

Onticology, like all variations of object-oriented ontology, is realist in its orientation. In defending a realist ontology onticology holds that the vast majority of objects, actants, beings, or entities are independent of humans and are what they are regardless of whether any humans regard them or register them. In short, onticology rejects any anthropomorphic, idealist, or anti-realist thesis to the effect that to be is to be the correlate of mind, spirit, the body, the human, language or otherwise. While it is certainly the case that knowledge is necessarily dependent on the object to which it relates, the converse does not hold true. Objects are not dependent on being known, regarded, perceived, or spoken about. As such, and to put it in Aristotlean terms, knowledge is an accident of objects, not objects an accident of knowledge. As Althusser so nicely puts it, “[n]o doubt there is a relation between thought-about-the-real and this real, but it is a relation of knowledge, a relation of adequacy or inadequacy of knowledge, not a real relation, meaning by this a relation inscribed in that real of which the thought is the (adequate or inadequate) knowledge” (Reading Capital, 96). Althusser goes on to remark that “[t]he distinction between a relation of knowledge and a relation of the real is a fundamental one: if we did not respect it we should fall irreversibly into either speculative or empiricist idealism” (ibid.). Onticology categorically endorses Althusser’s verdict. It is a fundamental necessity to distinguish between those relations that belong to the object and those that belong to knowledge. Contemporary philosophy continuously confuses these two very different sorts of relations.

Naturally the question arises of how it is possible to surmount our relation to the object so as to determine whether objects themselves possess the properties we encounter in relating to objects. In other words, given that we can only ever relate to the object in relating to the object how is it possible to surmount this relation to get at the being of the object itself? Much more will have to be said about this later– and the answers will be surprising with respect to standard prejudices about realism –however, for the moment it can be said that onticology takes its epistemological inspiration from the transcendental realism of Roy Bhaskar. Among other things, Bhaskar sought to provide a transcendental grounding for the sciences. Insofar as onticology defends the thesis that the field of being is much more vast than the field of objects investigated by the natural sciences, it parts way with the thesis that the domain of being is exhausted by the domain of natural objects. However, the general form of Bhaskar’s argument holds for our realist purposes.

read on!
A transcendental argument seeks to elucidate the conditions under which certain acknowledged practices and forms of cognition are possible. Kant, for example, asked what must be the case for mathematical judgments to be possible. How is it both that we are able to extend our knowledge, as if by magic, through mathematical judgments and, more significantly, that these judgments are able to provide genuine knowledge of the world despite the fact that these forms of reasoning are not based on experience? Part of Kant’s argument consisted in claiming that mind imposes the forms of space and time on the data of experience. In other words, space and time are not attributes of being itself but rather of the mind that regards being. Insofar, Kant argues, as mathematics is ultimately a rumination on the nature of space and time taken in their most abstract form and insofar as the mind imposes space and time on the manifold of sensation, it thus follows that a priori judgments about the nature of spatio-temporal relations are possible that anticipate the structure of actual-space times without directly experiencing these space-times. Why? Because any manifold of sensation must necessarily be structured by these forms imposed by intuition.

These arguments are well known so I only gloss them to remind readers of the nature of transcendental argument. These arguments come in many flavors. Thus, for example, when Saussure seeks to investigate the being of language and distinguishes between langue and parole he is making a transcendental argument to account for speech or the conditions under which certain speech acts are possible within a particular language. Langue or the synchronic system of signifiers is the condition under which parole or speech is possible. Here Saussure’s particular version of transcendental argument differs from Kant in two ways: First, langue is culturally and historically variable, whereas Kant’s a priori categories and forms of intuition are invariant, unchanging, and universal across culture. Second, Kant’s a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding are imposed by mind, albeit in the form of transcendental subjectivity, whereas Saussure’s langue is a collective structure that belongs to no subject in particular. What both thinkers share in common is the recognition that it is necessary to have recourse to conditions that are not themselves given in the given but which are nonetheless that through which or by which the given is given. In the case of Saussure it is taken as given that we speak and communicate. That is not disputed. The transcendental question is how this is possible. Likewise, in Kant, it is taken as given and beyond dispute that we make mathematical judgments, that these judgments apply to the manifold of intuition and are not just fictions or webs spun by a spider with no correlate in the world. The transcendental question is how this is possible. To answer these questions we need to have recourse to something other than the given or experience.

So too in the case of Bhaskar. Bhaskar asks how science is possible and why, in particular, we must have recourse to experiment in science. As such, Bhaskar is engaged in a transcendental inquiry. However, what distinguishes Bhaskar’s transcendental inquiry so much from prior transcendental inquiries is that it does not have recourse to mind, culture, language, or the human in formulating its answer, but rather to the world. In effect, Bhaskar asks not what our minds must be like for science to be possible, but rather, in a jaw dropping and audacious move, what the world must be like for science to be possible. In short, if our science is to be possible– and since it is actual we know that it is possible –the world must be a particular way. And this way in which the world must be is intimately linked to the fact that we must engage in experiment in order to conduct our science.

Bhaskar outlines two general features that the world must have in order for 1) our science to be possible, and 2) to explain why experiment is necessary. Let us take the second question first. Why is experiment necessary? If the empiricists were right and all our knowledge originated in sensation then we would be hard put to explain why experiment is necessary. Here it is noteworthy that Kant fully takes over the empiricist line of thought which holds that knowledge must be grounded in sensation. Rather, if experiment would be superfluous, then this is because it would be sufficient to simply observe nature passively and link the appropriate sensations, whether through a priori categories as in the case of Kant or modes of association as in the case of Hume. No, if experiment is indispensable, then this can only be because objects do not manifest their powers or capacities under ordinary conditions. Objects do not manifest or “give” their powers under ordinary conditions. Rather, it is only under the highly structured and isolated conditions of the experimental setting that we are able to encounter– or better yet, dis-cover –the powers that lie within objects. As a consequence, passively given sensations are not the origin of knowledge. Ontologically, then, the condition under which experiment is both possible and necessary is only in a world where objects can act without manifesting their act in either nature or for a perceiving subject.

As such it is necessary to distinguish the being of objects from the manifestation of objects. While objects are acts, these acts are not identical with their performance in either nature (events where no humans are about to perceive them) or with their performance for humans. Rather, the proper being of the object is not its performance or manifestation, but the generative mechanism that serves as the condition under which these performances or manifestations are possible. As Graham Harman will argue– though in a very different theoretical constellation –the being of objects is essentially withdrawn or hidden. No one has ever perceived a single object, but we do perceive all sorts of effects of objects. Traditional epistemology has confused these effects with the objects themselves. Fortunately we do occasionally manage to cognize objects through a sort of detective work that infers these generative mechanisms from their effects; without, for all this, ever exhausting the infinity of a single object. At any rate, if objects were not withdrawn in this way, the practice of experiment would be unintelligible.

This leads to Bhaskar’s answer to the first question: What must the world be like for science to be possible? Note, this is not a question about mind or culture, but about the world itself, regardless of whether or not humans exist. Once again, knowledge is an accident of objects, not objects an accident of consciousness or cognition. If science is to be possible– and I would argue, if any human practice is to be possible –then the world must be structured and differentiated. The world must have joints or, as Harman puts it, the world must be composed of “chunks”. Why is this the case? Let us return to the question of experimentation and the conditions under which experiment is possible. We will adopt two possible hypotheses pertaining to the ontological nature of the world independent of humans:

1) As certain mystics and contemporary crypto-mystics would have it, the world is an undifferentiated One-All that is only subsequently segmented or partitioned into discrete beings by some form of human agency whether this be through cognition or language (in the case of language we might think of Saussure’s and Hjelmslev’s undifferentiated “sonorous matter”).

2) Entities are the sum totality of their relations to all other entities in the universe.

The first hypothesis is easily dispatched on two grounds: First, this hypothesis fails to register the contradiction in its own utterance. At the level of explicit content, it claims that the world is an undifferentiated One-All that is only subsequently segmented into discrete beings, yet what it misses at the unconscious level of its own utterance is that it registers at least one structured differentiation that is not undifferentiated within this One-All: Namely, the agency through which the One-All subsequently comes to be differenciated. Certain anti-realist, transcendental philosophers will, in a gesture that is all too cute, claim that the agency by which the world is segmented cannot properly be said to exist, thus attempting to resolve this contradiction through a sleight of hand. However, as Meillassoux has shown in After Finitude, all attempts on the part of transcendental anti-realist philosophies to treat the transcendental subject as a non-existing or non-objectile agency that does not itself exist end up, all too clearly, attaching that conception of finitude and the segmentary work with which it is charged to the body (a differentiated being or generative mechanism). Second, suppose the anti-realist transcendental philosopher were to convince us through his appeals to the non-existence of the transcendental, would we still encounter problems? Like Atlas, transcendental subjectivity is charged with the monumental task of segmenting the formless apeiron of the One-All from out of primal chaos into a supremely segmented world. But this world appears to us to be too slippery for even a titan like Atlas to grasp. Were the world, prior to and independent of humans genuinely a formless apeiron it would contain no differences providing hand-holds for Atlas to grasp in his segmenting activity. Consequently, no segments could ever come into being. Yet everywhere we encounter segments, so the world must not be a formless One-All, but must rather be structured and differentiated even if structure and differentiation are transformed in their encounter with the human.

With this first hypothesis dispatched, let us investigate the second. The being of entities consists entirely of their relations to all other entities. Suppose, however, this were the case. Were this true then it would not be possible to form the closed systems necessary for experimental practice as it would be impossible to ever isolate an object or generative mechanism from the open system that leads to the covering of its generative powers. Yet we do engage in experiment and therefore do isolate generative mechanisms. While it might be the case that no generative mechanism is ever completely isolated from relations to other entities, it nonetheless follows, in principle, that objects are independent of their relations. Thus, while onticology readily recognizes that objects enter into relations, nonetheless onticology rejects the ontological thesis that objects are their relations. As Harman has noted, all sorts of ontological implications and questions follow from this thesis of a relationless object.

Note, then, how Bhaskar has inverted the nature of transcendental question and even epistemology itself. The transcendental belongs not to the mind, culture, or language (though in certain instances, yet to be discussed, it will), but rather is a property of the world itself. Moreover, it is ontology that is the condition of epistemology, not the reverse. The world must be a certain way in order for knowledge to be possible and these ontological conditions cannot be swallowed by an epistemological reduction to questions of what is given for or to consciousness. Moreover, one condition under which epistemology is possible is that of a world in which humans do not exist. This is a dramatic way of asserting that these are properties or features of being itself, not the relation of the human to being. Now, Bhaskar’s meditations are concerned with the ontology required for science to be possible. With these epistemological trivialities out of the way I hope to show that the form of this argument extends much further than the natural beings or generative mechanisms investigated by the sciences. But that investigation will have to await future posts.

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30 Responses to “Onticology– A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology Part 2”

‘Onticology categorically endorses Althusser’s verdict. It is a fundamental necessity to distinguish between those relations that belong to the object and those that belong to knowledge.’

But what is the ontology of the relation as such – such that our knowledge of objects can really be about those objects when they are ‘mind-independent’. I don’t see this clearly articulated – the univocity of the being of relation.
See John Deely, ‘A realism for the 31c century.’
Forget about it.

levi, hello…
i am interested in the way harman and heidegger seem to be making a strong appearance in this post.

am i correct in reading you to be saying, above, that there is indeed a split between the way objects are in nature/under ordinary conditions/as being and the way objects are in the lab, under human prodding, poking and observation/in experiment/as manifestation? i.e are we dealing with another form of concealment and unconcealment…

and if so, then doesn’t this lend a very uncomfortable amount of hubris to the human? i.e. that his poking and prodding is fundamentally different from the poking and prodding of a worm at a plant root, or is the point that every poke and prod is different and thus what generates the reception to such intrusions is the object in question?

Bingo! Terrific observation and set of questions! Harman’s thesis, and one that I more or less share, is that no two objects grasp one another. Within my framework, all objects will be actualized or manifested depending on how they are “poked and prodded” by other objects. The object is thus withdrawn in the sense that it possesses an excess of powers over any of its manifestations and this excess can never be exhausted for the reason that no object ever enters into all possible relations it could entertain. At the epistemological level, this entails that the production of knowledge is never a passive relation in which objects are simply “looked at”, observed, or passively received through sensation. Rather objects have to be actively prodded to manifest themselves in particular ways. Maybe you could say a bit as to why this amounts to a hubris on the part of humans.

The idea that the production of knowledge is not a passive relation is, of course, also central to Piaget (a name that is virtually forgotten). No knowledge apart from semovience – as Maine de Biran would also affirm.
Btw, assuming that no object enters into all the relations it could entertain why would it thus need an intermediary? There can be a ‘grasping’, or genuine relation – it’s just not total?

This might need more than one go to get it right.
I’m partly referring to Graham Harman’s thesis that objects have no direct contact – one that you ‘partly share.’ Altho onticology is ‘flat’ – all objects have the same ontology…

What I’m wondering is that, even if we accept objects exceeding an given encounter, why we cannot say that there is ‘direct contact’, even if only partial. Objects really do have contact – they don’t have to use up all their possibilities in that encounter.

When the rain drop hits the pavement there are other possible things it could have done (I could have opened my mouth to the sky and let it straight in) but it still has direct contact with the pavement…???

Zubiri, in Sentient Intelligence, is happy to see a ‘shove’ understood in terms of efficient causality – a direct contact.

It seems clear to us that a shove, however modest, falls under efficient causality. But on the other hand, if we try to apply the idea of the four causes to an act of advising a friend,
we are struck by grave doubts about the possible type of causality of the advice. This points up the fact that Aristotle’s
celebrated theory of causality is strictly formed around “natural” realities. Aristotle’s causality is a theory
of natural causality.

Zubiri, Sentient Intelligence, p.328

I thought this quote from Crocco illustrates nicely how knowledge does not arise passively:

The largest thing in the solar system, Jupiter’s magnetosphere
(ten times the width of the sun), was only recognized in quite recent times
and by means of actions performed by instruments journeying to the thing,
unseen when one simply gazes at Jupiter. It instances a class (or “concept”)
whose previously encountered samples were smaller. Nut kernels, instead,
are more straightforwardly recognized, as what appears whenever cracking
open an instance of the appropriate class of woody shells. Yet in both cases
the notion is established by the appropriate courses of semovient causal actions (“nut cracking” and “Jupiter probe-sending”) and the sensual intonations
that these actions generate in return; Platonic contemplation does not
infuse knowledge.

Levi, I think I do understand Paul’s question, because it’s an objection I’ve heard several times before.

People ask me: “Why do objects need to be withdrawn from all relation? Why not just say that they are *partially* in relation?” And I’m pretty sure that’s what Paul means here.

My response to this (not that different from Leibniz’s in the Monadology) is that an object isn’t pieced together out of parts. It’s not as if humans can touch trees directly, but due to some sad epistemological limits we can only ever know 85% or 90% of the tree. No, the point is that the tree is not something pieces together out of a finite number of accessible qualities, and hence to come in contact with some of those qualities is already an *indirect* relation to the tree. Qualities are already mediators with respect to the things to which they belong.

In my opinion Leibniz pushes this a bit too far, though. He thinks the fact that monads are simple also means that they have no internal components, and hence that they cannot possibly be destroyed. By contrast, I see no problem in saying that a living creature for instance is one thing, not built out of a bundle of qualities, but that it also still has pieces and that by messing with those pieces enough you can destroy the living creature without difficulty. The unity of an object over against all its relations and qualities does not entail a lack of internal composition.

Anyway, don’t want to hog Levi’s message board, but I just wanted to say that I did understand Paul’s objection, I think.

Levi, thanks for clarifying – you took the hubris out via the explanation. responding to your discussion with paul and harman’s response, the idea that il n’ya pas de relacion (sexuel – for lacan, ontological for derrida) i.e. objects do not touch but are always mediated… in the best cases it seems to play out like the ‘there is no truth so everything is true’ dichotomy, and in the worst it implies an irretrievable/impenetrable essence. you’ve posted on this so many times before that i know i should just go back and reread, but i am wondering: if we travel down the path of no relations, we end up somewhere like latour’s network theory – a might vs right relationship where the most ties become the truest ties (i’m speed racing shamelessly, aren’t i?) then don’t we end up squarely in the realm of kant’s common sense – i.e. truth by concensus? and if that is the case, how are we moving out from correlationism?

you can point me to a book and chapter, as i am certain this is a question you and harman have had repeatedly. …i just couldn’t resist!

i am wondering: if we travel down the path of no relations, we end up somewhere like latour’s network theory – a might vs right relationship where the most ties become the truest ties (i’m speed racing shamelessly, aren’t i?) then don’t we end up squarely in the realm of kant’s common sense – i.e. truth by consensus? and if that is the case, how are we moving out from correlationism?

It seems to me that Latour conflates two very different issues in his might makes right thesis. On the one hand, there’s the ontological issue of what constitutes the being of a being or its existence. On the other hand, there’s the issue of the degree to which a being is present or appears in any given situation. As I see it, whether or not something is is a simple binary. Either something is or it is not, either it exists or it does not. The fact that something manifests itself more or is more apparent in a situation or world by virtue of possessing more relations to other entities is irrelevant to the being or existence of an entity. Thus, for example, the sun has far more extensive relations to other entities than an insignificant grain of cosmic dust, but nothing about this entails that the sun is more real.

In fairness to Latour, however, I think we have to be very careful with just what Latour has in mind by his concept of alliances. Initially, I think, when we hear the thesis that truth is a function of alliances, we get this sickening feeling that Latour is claiming that truth is whatever is agreed upon by the largest majority of human beings. The problem with this reading, I think, is that Latour’s networked alliances are never just alliances among humans. As Latour will playfully put it in texts like The Pasteurization of France and Science in Actions, the real problem is not getting humans to agree, but to get nonhuman actors to agree. In other words, you have to get all those test tubes, beakers, chemical compounds, temperatures, etc., to cooperate with what you’re trying to establish. This significantly changes the nature of the problem and the question. Latour’s thesis isn’t the facile thesis that truth is whatever humans say it is, but is a far more profound question of how it is possible to form abiding and enduring assemblages of objects that hold together and don’t fly apart. This entails that there are always significant constraints on what human will, subjectivity, discourse, etc., can do. The world and objects talk back and have their own say.

I think Ian Bogost’s work on video games. What makes this work, among other things, so interesting is that it doesn’t just examine games at the level of their semiotics, text, or content, but looks at how the actual software, hardware, and platforms both constrain the production of these assemblages, playing a significant role in the form they take. Racing the Beam is especially good here to get a sense of the flavor of what Bogost is getting at. Although Bogost is critical of Latour on a number of points, nonetheless his thought significantly drives home the point of just what it means to form an “alliance” or a “consensus” when this is expanded beyond its ordinary and commonplace restriction to the human. I did write a post on this back in October which you can find here:

[…] work of Roy Bhaskar, in the two manifestos on object-oriented ontology in the side bar (here and here). The thesis that effects are products of objects relies on a transcendental argument. In other […]

Hi Levi,
I actually agree with your proposal of doing an ontological turn of the trascendental method, but it seems to me that it must be radicalized. You say:
“[t]he distinction between a relation of knowledge and a relation of the real is a fundamental one: if we did not respect it we should fall irreversibly into either speculative or empiricist idealism” (ibid.). Onticology categorically endorses Althusser’s verdict. It is a fundamental necessity to distinguish between those relations that belong to the object and those that belong to knowledge”

I think that in supporting a bipolar division between knowledge relations and object relations, we are lead to hold a special status for the human subject and the correlative special status for the object of knowledge. In doing so, at the end of the experiment the powers of the things we can discover become mere qualities for subsequent conceptualization and the consequent gap between object and subject. I mean, ontology not only comes first, epistemology is a special branch of ontology.

Thank You Levi. This is a very good new for me. I’m now attempting to initiate the construction of an ontological approximation to the new physics (quantum field theory, thermodynamics of irreversible processes…) and the theories of complexity through the work of Zubiri, Whitehead and Deleuze for my doctoral thesis. And as you may know, the focus of the zubirian’s investigations don’t fit with these purposes.
I wait impatient for Graham’s books and your forthcoming too.

[…] what the world must be like for inquiry to be possible. I have outlined these arguments here and here, and devote the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects to these arguments. The second post […]

Levi: There’s a step in your method that I’m having trouble with, and I want to raise a challenge without necessarily wanting to disagree with your conclusions.

“if our science is to be possible – and since it is actual we know that it is possible –the world must be a particular way.”

Doesn’t this make presuppositions about experimental science? I don’t see how you eliminate the experimenters role from the experiment, and without this step, I don’t really see how you step outside of correlationism so much as reposition its focus.

What I’m saying is that there is no experiment without an experimenter – not just to construct, execute and observe the experiment, but also to provide the theoretical elements upon which the experiment is constructed. (I am neither idealist nor realist, so please don’t mistake this question for a claim in this vein).

When you say “science is actual” this seems to me to imply a lot of claims that are simply assumed… Perhaps this is dealt with by Bhaskar, I’m unsure.

Three quotes from you before my next question:

“Fortunately we do occasionally manage to cognize objects through a sort of detective work that infers these generative mechanisms from their effects”

“At any rate, if objects were not withdrawn in this way, the practice of experiment would be unintelligible.”

“Yet we do engage in experiment and therefore do isolate generative mechanisms.”

There’s much I like in this account, but the conclusion that we *do* isolate objects via experiment seems problematic to me – because theoretical models are essential to the experiment and especially to the act of inference from which the object is derived – but if this kind of argument is crucial to onticology, then aren’t you carrying correlationism along for the ride as a “hidden passenger”?

I apologise if I have misunderstood, but the experiment is carrying a lot of weight here that I don’t think its back will bear. The results of experiments depend upon the assumptions of the experimenter as much as the equipment and data produced – you can’t simply sweep this element under the carpet.

Without wanting to take a stance on psi research (about which I am agnostic), it is unavoidable that the same experiment and results produces different conclusions in (say) the Ganzfeld experiment, depending principally on the beliefs of the experimenter or critic. In less controversial ground, the results of experiments concerning the gravitational constant do not produce the relevant value (which is calculated by theory), they merely show that its value is indeed close to what is calculated by theory. The experimental method is *not* mere observation, it is theory-led.

Finally, to go back to the first of these fascinating posts:

“The thesis that the world conforms to the human, rather than the human to the world. Insofar as the world conforms to the human there is no need to speak of the world because the world, as Kant suggested, is always-already given in advance.”

Now Kant believed ‘the world conforms to the human’ because of his wider beliefs, but Kant’s transcendental stance needn’t go where Kant went – Kant’s point in isolation is arguably that what we can know is what we can get access to. Now the connection with the experimental point above is: what about those things outside of access by either means? What about the ghosts in Harman’s “dark subterranean reality”, what I’ve dubbed the underreality? Do the underreal ghosts exist? It depends on if they make a difference… but a difference to whom or what? And how would we know, since the underreality is by definition invisible not just to us but to everything?

You take this Latourian move which says “what makes a difference exists” but what I have to ask is: how do we know what makes a difference? Whether by Kantian transcendental method or by scientific experiment, the differences we detect are solely those which we can access by some means – everything we cannot access does not exist by your method. (Or does it exist but we don’t know that it exists? I am confused as to what your ontology claims at this point).

If this is so, then object-oriented ontology still has a trace of correlationism within it – because that which makes a difference in a way that we cannot detect or know remains unknown and unknowable to us. The objects of onticology are still shackled to the human at the point where your ontology meets observation. To my mind, you don’t appear to have left Kant behind so much as refined his method.

I feel it is likely I have misunderstood something but I am unsure where I am coming unstuck.

Another related question is: does a concept not-yet thought constitute an object in your flat ontology? Let’s say that there is a future theoretical particle in physics called the flopon. Now the theory isn’t there, so the flopon doesn’t exist in your flat ontology as a conceptual abstratum, and we can’t know if there is an object of this kind experimentally because the theory isn’t there to begin to test for it. So does the flopon exist? Do future objects constitute objects in your onticological schema? If not, then the objects in the onticology vary according to theory, and thus once again correlationism seems to be along for the ride in some way. And if the flopon does exist then is a complete onticology something that is only possible “at the end of time” (so to speak), or at least, is onticology equally bound by the limitations of the human as much as any other ontological approach?

Surely I’m missing something, but I find it hard to sever this connection. Any assistance welcome!

Sorry I’m so late to this thread. Very delicious throughout parts 1 and 2. I have one question: Where is my man? These critiques of Kant are astonishingly parallel to his work in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, so I’m just curious.

I’m also be curious as to how the transcendental realism of Roy Bhaskar is similar to/different from the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze.

I like your manifesto because it expands the obligation of the philosopher once again to explore the world. I also enjoy your focus on objects as systems with generative mechanisms. There is in this view still a respect for science, at a time when science is investigating some fundamental hypotheses.

I would enjoy hearing you discuss the work of Antonio Damasio, since he appears to be attempting to explain generative mechanisms in the animal kingdom.

Also, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) model of Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose is making some interesting predictions about generative mechanisms at the level of quantum biology — a very promising field of inquiry!

I have read a lot about object-oriented ontology, and watched HOURS of professor Graham Harman speak. I am wondering about the criticisms I have been hearing from the (slightly crazy) Eilif Verney-Elliott to Ross Wolfe (? I think that is his name) and his ‘Marxist’ analysis. What is going on in the world of OOO and SR, and why are so many going crazy, is it some allergy to new thought? Thoughts?